What do you guys make of the tweet that I read this morning by one "American Muskrat"?
"I am under the impression the Philosopher is speaking of improving the mind directly with drugs, consciousness expansion, that sort of thing. I don't buy into that anymore.
Insomnia sucks, it's why I'm drinking beer in a hotel bathroom at 4:40am."
I don't know about you, but I took this as a prohibitionist broadside. In other words, I thought that the Muskrat was dissing godsend medicines.
Based on that assumption, I took that tweet as a challenge and responded rapidly with the following indignant barrage.
Read folks like Alexander Shulgin1, James Fadiman2, and Stanislav Grof3 for documented evidence of how drugs can improve the mind and even grow new neurons. For the latest evidence, see Psychedelic Medicine by Richard Louis Miller4.
And this is before we even start talking about the obvious fact that almost ANY "pick me up" drug can be used to fight depression -- except that racist politicians have convinced us with non-stop indoctrination that humans are too infantile to ever use them wisely56.
I don't know how anybody can say that psychoactive drugs cannot help when there are thousands we have never studied and even the known drugs are studied through a lens of Christian Science biashttps://www.abolishthedea.com/citations.php.
They must not be aware of the way that drugs like MDMA 7 are being used, even now, to revitalize old relationships and marriages and to make talk therapy really work. See "Listening to Ecstasy" by Charles Wininger8.
Author's Follow-up: May 25, 2024
Update: The guy means it. Weird. It's always hard for me to believe that there are people out there who have swallowed America's drug-war propaganda hook, line and sinker. They actually tell us that they know that there is no benefit in drugs -- not realizing that they use drugs every day of their life: coffee, nicotine, alcohol, antidepressants 9, MONSTER energy drinks10. They mean there's no benefit in the drugs they don't like.
Typical American know-it-all-ism.
But then he's obviously a troll, since only a troll would tell a 65-year-old that he's "going through a phase."
People say shrooms should not be used by those with a history of "mental illness." But that's one of the greatest potential benefits of shrooms! (They cured Stamets' teenage stuttering.) Some folks place safety first, but if I did that, I'd die long before using mother nature.
Addiction was not a big thing until the drug war. It's now the boogie-man with which drug warriors scare us into giving up our freedoms. But getting obsessed on one single drug is natural in the age of choice-limiting prohibition.
I can think of no greater intrusion than to deny a person autonomy over how they think and feel in life. It is sort of a meta-intrusion, the mother of all anti-democratic intrusions.
The term "hard" is just our modern pejorative term for the kinds of drugs that doctors of yore used to call panaceas
Drug war pundits need to stop using the word "snorts" when it comes to cocaine. We "take" our "meds," and yet we "snort" cocaine, just like a pig. That is NOT neutral language, folks!
The DEA should be put on trial for crimes against humanity for withholding godsend medicine from the depressed. Here is just one typical drug-user report that appeared in "Pihkal": "A glimpse of what true heaven is supposed to feel like..."
If we let "science" decide about drugs, i.e. base freedom on health concerns, then tea can be as easily outlawed as beer. The fact that horses are not illegal shows that prohibition is not about health. It's about the power to outlaw certain "ways of being in the world."
"Users" can be kept out of the workforce by the extrajudicial process of drug testing; they can have their baby taken from them, their house, their property -- all because they do not share the intoxiphobic attitude of America.
SWAT raids have increased by 15,000 percent from the late 1970s to today, resulting in 50,000 to 80,000 SWAT raids annually in the US alone. --War On Us
That's why we damage the brains of the depressed with shock therapy rather than let them use coca or opium. That's why many regions allow folks to kill themselves but not to take drugs that would make them want to live. The Drug War is a perversion of social priorities.
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